The first lab meeting is informational and organizational in nature. During the next three lab meetings of the semester, the students work in groups of three, each group having a separate TA. During this time, the students will start to process their wafers, with very close supervision by the TA, who will demonstrate each step along the way. By the end of the fourth meeting, the students will have acquired the knowledge and experience to finish processing their wafers with minimal help from the TA. From the fifth meeting on, the students are on their own to follow the fabrication recipe, with the TA providing assistance on a limited basis, as needed.
During meeting 2, 3, or 4 (depending upon which group the student is assigned to in the first week) the student will do the IC-CAP tutorial. The purpose of the tutorial is to allow the students to become familiar with the IC-CAP software -which they will use to test the wafers at the end of the semester-, and also to gain experience in using a metal evaporator. As part of the IC-CAP tutorial, the students fabricate schottky diodes by evaporating aluminum through a shadow mask onto n-type silicon wafers. This wafer is different from the wafer used in the remainder of the lab meetings, and will not be used again, once testing of the schottky diodes is complete.
Thus, the lab portion of the course consists mainly of the IC fabrication project, the IC-CAP tutorial, and wafer testing.
During the course of processing the wafers, students are exposed to the "workhorse" technologies of the semiconductor industry, including wafer cleaning, oxidation, photolithography, etching, diffusion, and metal deposition. This laboratory experience is intended to help engineering students who plan either to work within the semiconductor industry or to utilize semiconductors in their designs. The latter purpose is not as obvious as the first, but knowledge of how transistors and ICs are fabricated can help an engineer get the most out of them. Modeling semiconductors as black boxes with certain specifications (SPICE models) is an important engineering technique, but after this laboratory the student will not have to treat semiconductors as mysterious black boxes.